This Day in Aviation History: Reporting a UFO

When I was kid in the 1960’s, flying saucers or Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s) were all the rage.   Did the Twilight Zone and Outer Limits on TV exacerbate our fears and therefore our sightings? 

We tossed garbage pan lids into the air and took pictures of them, trying to replicate “real” UFO’s.  We tried Frisbees, too, but the bigger, heavier, galvanized steel garbage can lids were far easier to photograph as “fake” UFO’s.  Of course, we had to finish the rolls of film and take them to the local Fotomat kiosk and wait a week or so to get the developed photos back before we could check on how realistic our fake UFO’s actually looked.  We were patient…in some ways…as teens.

My best friend in high school (who ended up as my best man at my wedding, too) and I used to sleep over each other’s homes.  We’d crawl out on the roof from our bedroom windows on sweet summer nights in northern Ohio and lay back, our heels dug into the gutters so we wouldn’t slide off the roof, and look up at the stars and dream of girls, what we’d do when we grew up, and of extra-terrestrial life.

One night, about 2:00am, we both saw these lights slowly fly by over our home that, based on the lights, must have been a massive airborne craft of some sort.  No sound, just the lights outlining the perimeter of this massive craft slowly flew by, bigger than our village block.  We knew we were seeing something “other worldly” but not sure what it could have been. 

The next day we called the NASA office in Cleveland, Ohio to report our sighting of a UFO.  This was prior to routine use of marijuana by high school kids (at least in our little village of Mayfield, Ohio), so we likely were not thought of as being “high” or “on something”…which we were not.  But the patient secretary (“Yeah, right kid.”) still took our report and thanked us for being vigilant and we never heard anything else, at least not officially, from anyone.

“The Calvine photo,” named after the hamlet in Scotland where it was taken, in 1990. Photograph courtesy of Craig Lindsay / Sheffield Hallam University

But my best friend and I were certain we’d seen something that was not just in our young man’s imaginations…which tended to run wild in a lot of different ways at our ages anyway.

By the way, typical of government gobbledygook and gibberish and our propensity for making simple things unnecessarily complex, UFO’s are now “officially” known as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP).

And it wasn’t just me and my best friend reporting UFO’s…or UAP’s.  We were in good company.  And about at the same time too.

In today’s aviation history vignette, “Jimmy Carter files a report on a UFO sighting”.

Downloaded today from:  https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/september-18/carter-files-report-on-ufo-sighting.

According to History.com, “Future President Jimmy Carter filed a report with the International UFO Bureau on September 18, 1973, claiming he had seen an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) in October 1969.

“During the presidential campaign of 1976, Democratic challenger Carter was forthcoming about his belief that he had seen a UFO.  He described waiting outside for a Lion’s Club Meeting in Leary, Georgia, to begin, at about 7:30 p.m., when he spotted what he called ‘the darndest thing I’ve ever seen’ in the sky.  Carter, as well as 10 to 12 other people who witnessed the same event, described the object as ‘very bright [with] changing colors and about the size of the moon.’ Carter reported that ‘the object hovered about 30 degrees above the horizon and moved in toward the earth and away before disappearing into the distance.’ He later told a reporter that, after the experience, he vowed never again to ridicule anyone who claimed to have seen a UFO.

“During the presidential campaign of 1976, Carter promised that, if elected president, he would encourage the government release ‘every piece of information’ about UFOs available to the public and to scientists. After winning the presidency, though, Carter backed away from this pledge, saying that the release of some information might have ‘defense implications’ and ‘pose a threat to national security’.”

Onward and upward!

Sources:  History.com, Craig Lindsay / Sheffield Hallam University